OurTupelo

The post Marshall Ramsey: Somewhere In Mississippi appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today

A Neshoba County School District student looks out the window of a school bus after the first day of school on Wednesday, August 5, 2020.

Teachers at a school in the Rankin County School District were given two masks, a small bottle of hand sanitizer and a spray bottle of chemicals marked “hazardous to humans and domestic animals” by the district to last them the semester.

At a school in the Jackson County School District, teachers received so few cleaning supplies from the district that they’re having to tear off-brand Lysol wipes in half just to have enough to wipe down desks between classes. A little more than a week since students returned to the district, teachers are already spending their own money to buy additional cleaning supplies for their classrooms.

At a school in the Itawamba County School District, administrators are not enforcing mask mandates on students in hallways or other common areas, and students and teachers are regularly pulling masks below their noses. In the Poplarville School District, administrators have told teachers that students are allowed to remove masks in classrooms if they are just two feet apart, directly countering recommendations of state health officials that everyone wear masks and stay six feet from other people.

As most schools across the state have reopened for in-person instruction, dozens of teachers are sharing horror stories of not being provided the resources and protections they were promised by district and state leaders when reopening plans were finalized.

Educators whose stories were shared with Mississippi Today for this article feared losing their jobs or retaliation from district leaders. Teachers in Mississippi — the lowest paid in the nation on average — sign annual contracts that include broad termination clauses, and many districts disallow teachers to speak directly with journalists without permission from district offices. For these reasons, the teachers cited or quoted in this article are not named.

Teachers across the state have reason to be concerned as early COVID-19 data for schools paints a bleak picture. As of Tuesday — less than two weeks since the start of school in most places — at least 589 teachers across the state are quarantining because of possible exposure. At least 245 teachers have tested positive.

There are at least 2,035 students quarantined in the first few days of the school year, and at least 199 across the state have tested positive.

On Friday, 38 of the state’s 82 counties reported confirmed cases in public schools. By Monday, 71 counties reported confirmed cases in schools. Health officials have said it’s likely that many students and teachers already had the virus before school started and brought it with them with classes resumed.

Earlier this month, Gov. Tate Reeves assessed the reopening plans of all 138 school districts and announced he would let most of them commence as planned. Reeves ruled that schools in eight counties that were deemed hotspots — representing just 7% of the state’s total student population — should delay two weeks until Aug. 17.

In doing so, Reeves bucked the advice of education advocates and the state’s top medical professionals, who’d publicly urged leaders to delay the start of school to at least early September. Minutes after Reeves announced he would allow schools to reopen on time, State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs, sitting next to Reeves in a live press conference, said of reopening schools: “I think it’s nuts.”

“It’s impossible to imagine that we are not going to pay the price for cramming kids into schools right now,” Dobbs said earlier this month. “There’s just no plausible scenario where it’s just not going to be bad.”

Without statewide mandates and limited standards for reopening, districts were tasked with deciding for themselves how and when to reopen and how to handle safety concerns. This has caused even neighboring school districts to respond differently to confirmed cases — a point of frustration for many teachers who spoke with Mississippi Today.

For example, more than 100 students at Gulfport High School were quarantined last week after a choir teacher tested positive. A teacher at a neighboring school district told Mississippi Today that her district is choosing not to quarantine in similar ways.

“We’re hearing that a couple students in my school have tested positive,” the teacher told Mississippi Today. “But we didn’t do like Gulfport and quarantine everyone who possibly came in contact with those students. It just begs the question: Why isn’t there something uniform? Why isn’t the state making everyone do this the same way? It doesn’t feel like anyone has a good grasp on best practices, and it’s making us feel unsafe.”

And the stories of unsafe school activities or districts not adhering to their announced reopening plans are stacking up.

Seniors at Oak Grove High School in Hattiesburg participated in their annual, school-sponsored senior celebration event the first week of school. Photos of the event on social media showed students on the school’s football field in very close quarters while wearing no masks. A few hours later, Lamar County School District officials sent parents of the seniors a text that read: “If your student participated this morning in Sr. celebration, we are notifying that a positive Covid case has been identified.”

In the Grenada School District, janitors haven’t been given enough cleaning supplies to clean classrooms at the end of each day as their district leaders promised in their reopening plans signed off on by state leaders.

“It’s honestly just a disaster waiting to happen,” a Gulf Coast teacher told Mississippi Today. “We’re doing the best we can, but it feels like there’s just no way to keep everyone safe. That’s not a good feeling.”

The post Teachers share grim details of Mississippi school districts failing to uphold COVID reopening promises appeared first on Mississippi Today.

If we do have a college football season in Mississippi — and I still think it’s 50-50 at this point — we’re looking at quite possibly the most abnormal season since 1918. That’s when Mississippi State legend Dudy Noble coached at Ole Miss, Mississippi State played Ole Miss twice and Southern Miss didn’t play football at all.

Not coincidentally, that’s the last time the world experienced a pandemic to rival this one.

We knew months ago this was going to be a most interesting football season in the Magnolia State. First, Ole Miss hired Lane Kiffin last December. Then, a month later, Mississippi State hired Mike Leach. Two of college football’s lightning rods, friendly rivals on the other side of the continent in the past, were headed to Mississippi. Clearly, the 2020 season was going to be interesting and different. We had no idea…

Rick Cleveland

Then came the pandemic. And we still have no idea. Things change every day.

Today, let’s pause, take a deep breath and consider what we do know:

• The SWAC — to which Jackson State, Alcorn State and Mississippi Valley State belong — won’t play this fall. The hope is to play an abbreviated spring schedule. We’ll see.

• The same is true in the Gulf South Conference. The next Heritage Bell Classic, pitting Delta State against Mississippi College, will not take place until at least next spring.

• Mississippi’s junior colleges have delayed their season until an October start, but perennial powerhouse East Mississippi Community College, which has won five national championships since 2011, will not play. “The well-being of my players will always come first,” EMCC coach Buddy Stephens said. “There are too many unknowns to put in front of our players moving forward at this time.”

• Those unknowns have caused the Big Ten and the Pac 12 — two of college football’s five power conferences — to postpone all fall sports. That, in turn, has caused an open rebellion of some coaches, many players and at least one Big Ten school (Nebraska).

• The Southeastern Conference has delayed its season until a Sept. 26 start and will play a 10-game (all league games) schedule, followed by a championship game. If it goes off as scheduled, State will open at defending national champion LSU and Ole Miss will play host to Florida. The league games-only schedule will be brutal. There are no cupcakes. Leach and Kiffin will earn those millions. Kiffin reportedly makes $4 million a year, Leach makes $5 million. In 2020, that may well end up equating to a million bucks per victory.

• Ole Miss senior center Eli Johnson, who started all 12 games last season, became the first player at either State or Ole Miss to opt out of playing in 2020. And who can blame him? Eli’s father, sports writer David Johnson, spent weeks on a ventilator in ICU and nearly died from COVID-19. Eli Johnson, who has played through numerous injuries and already has graduated, will work on his Masters in criminal justice.

• Difficult to tell what changes more often these days, the Southern Miss schedule or its roster. Both have changed radically, all related to the pandemic. Three of the Golden Eagles’ best players have opted out in recent days: defensive end Jacques Turner, linebacker Rakeem Booth and wide receiver/return specialist Jaylond Adams. All say they will enter the transfer portal. The same is true of reserve running back Steven Johnson, at 260 pounds, one of the nation’s largest.

While other leagues have postponed or delayed the season, Conference USA will begin in early September. In fact, Southern Miss plans to open at home Sept. 3 (a Thursday night) against South Alabama. The Eagles’ schedule has continued to evolve with Jackson State, Auburn and Tennessee Tech all having to be replaced. The schedule now includes home games with Tulane and North Alabama. Yes, it’s hard to keep up.

Still, the 2020 season will have to go some to surpass 1918 for eccentricity. State played only five games, Ole Miss four, 102 years ago when another pandemic was ravaging Mississippi and the nation. State defeated Ole Miss 34-0 at Starkville and 13-0 at Oxford. That’s right, Dudy Noble’s Ole Miss team scored as many points against State as you and I.

The next year Noble was back at his alma mater: State. We can only hope things get back to normal so soon this time around.

The post This college football season, if we have one, might be strangest since 1918 Spanish Flu appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A screenshot of Rep. Wilkes’ now-deleted tweet.

State Rep. Stacey Hobgood-Wilkes, R-Picayune, said she didn’t mean to tweet a photo of the Confederate battle flag in response to a tweet reminding people they could vote on a new flag design for the state of Mississippi.

Wilkes, who was first elected to the Mississippi House in a 2017 special election and re-elected in 2019, said she quickly removed the tweet of the Confederate flag flying with a rainbow in the background from her private Twitter account.

“It was a huge accident,” she said. “I just saw the rainbow and the pretty picture. I did not notice that it was not the state flag.”

She was replying to a tweet from freshman Rep. Jansen Owen, R-Poplarville, encouraging people to go to the website of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to express their preference for a new flag design for the state. In June, the Mississippi Legislature voted to remove the 126-year-old state flag that featured the Confederate battle emblem in its design. Wilkes voted against the bill removing the controversial flag.

A commission has been formed to recommend a new flag design for voters to approve or reject in the Nov. 3 general election. If voters reject that design, the commission will recommend another one. The law mandates the new design contains the phrase “In God We Trust,” but cannot include the Confederate battle emblem.

Wilkes said when she mistakenly posted the photo of the Confederate flag, she was trying to make the point that people should have been given the opportunity to vote on whether they wanted to remove the Confederate symbol from the flag.

“I think the voters would have done the right thing and voted to change the flag,” she said.

A group called Let Mississippi Vote has been formed and says it will attempt to gather the more than 100,000 signatures needed to place on the ballot a proposal that could restore the flag with the Confederate emblem as the state’s official flag if approved by voters. Their proposal would let voters choose between the old 1894 flag, a flag with the state seal on it, the Hospitality Flag and whatever design the flag commission adopts.

The group filed paperwork with the Secretary of State’s office on Monday. Once the initial paperwork and legal work is completed, the group will have one year to gather the necessary signatures.

Rep. Stacey Hobgood-Wilkes

Wilkes’ Twitter account is private. She has 168 followers.

Former Pearl River County Supervisor Anthony Hales Sr. said he received screenshots of her tweet from two residents of the county. He posted the screenshot of her tweet of the Confederate flag on his Facebook page.

“They were appalled by her posting that,” he said of the residents who alerted him of her tweet. Hales, who served as supervisor from 1996 until 2016, said, “I don’t know why she chose to put that up. It is not a good look.”

The post ‘Not a good look’: Rep. Wilkes says posting photo of Confederate battle flag was accident appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi recently hit a positive COVID-19 milestone, touted by Gov. Tate Reeves and other state officials in recent days: For the first time since mid-July, the rolling average for new daily cases fell below 1,000.

But as both the daily number of new cases and weekly average number of cases continue to fall, the average number of tests administered has also fallen to a three-month low, meaning Mississippi could be failing to identify and isolate active cases.

On Monday, the state reported its lowest number of daily cases in over a month, at 276. Weekend reporting tends to reflect lower numbers because of reporting lags from the previous week. But even for weekend numbers, Monday’s daily case report was low. Monday case numbers from the last three weeks showed 476 last week and previously 572 and 653, respectively.

But on Tuesday, numbers ticked back up to 795 new cases. Though the new cases are still above average for the last week, they’re the lowest Tuesday since late June.

State officials point to masking and social distancing as successfully driving case numbers down, but they also caution Mississippians to not let their guard down. Praising the declining case trends, Reeves says the concerted effort is paying off.

“This didn’t just happen,” Reeves said. “The virus spreads until we can do the little things to mitigate further spread, and that’s what happening in Mississippi.”

But as the number of new cases continues to decrease, statewide COVID-19 testing has also decreased over the same time to its lowest daily average since mid-May. Though the average daily number of tests administered ticked up slightly Monday to just over 3,000, that number was at a three-month low as of Sunday. A month ago, as daily new cases were heading toward their peak, Mississippi averaged 6,000 daily tests.

As both new cases and new tests decrease, the state’s net positivity rate remains high — still the highest in the nation using the last week’s worth of total positive tests out of all tests, currently averaging 22%. Mississippi also still has the fourth-most daily new cases per capita, behind Georgia, Florida and Texas. 

Reeves disputes the test positivity rate and says not all clinics report all tests, which can falsely inflate the test positivity rate. Using the White House Coronavirus Task Force methodology, which analyzes a test positivity rate based on a consistent number of clinics that reliably report both negative and positive test results, showed previous weeks between 13 and 15%.

This week’s update from the White House task force showed a new positivity rate of 12% for Mississippi, according to Reeves’ spokesperson. Though they only reflect about a quarter of tests across the state, as of Monday the state health department’s and University of Mississippi Medical Center’s in-house labs show weekly test positivity rates of about 11 and 15% respectively, more aligned with the White House’s previous reports.

“Test positivity, when taken in context with all the other data we get, it is an important number, but when you take it and say this is all that matters, it is a flawed approach — test positivity matters in context with all the other data points.” Reeves said Monday.

The “lagging indicators” that show delayed results of previous weeks’ cases are still high in Mississippi. The state’s hospital system is one of the most strained in the U.S. and new deaths per capita are only matched by Florida. Looking at deaths across the pandemic, Mississippi is ranked eighth for most deaths per capita overall — mostly behind states that saw early spikes in deaths due to quick case surges, like New Jersey and New York, that have plateaued since, compared to Mississippi’s deaths that have only recently spiked.

Across the nation, COVID-19 is now the third-leading cause of death, despite only eight months of U.S. activity. In Mississippi, long-term care residents once dominated deaths, accounting for a disproportionate share of more than half of all deaths in the spring — they now account just just over 40% of all deaths and just one-quarter over the last month.

Though overall COVID-19 hospitalizations — confirmed and suspected COVID-19 patients — hit their lowest point in a month Sunday, and intensive care units saw their lowest COVID use in the past three weeks, the state’s health care system is still stretched too thin, warned State Health Officer Thomas Dobbs Monday.

Using the state health departments new hospitalization tracker, the state’s high-level COVID care centers are particularly stressed. Of the 16 hospitals across the state designated as the highest level of COVID care (levels 1 and 2), their combined 555 ICU beds are 90% full, about one-third of which house COVID patients, as of Sunday. Across the state, 903 ICU beds are 83% full with the same proportion of COVID patients. Pre-COVID, the state’s ICU capacity ran about two-thirds full on average.

As of Sunday, Jackson had two ICU beds available.

The post COVID-19 cases continue to decrease, but testing hits a three-month low appeared first on Mississippi Today.